Microsoft
Office is the dominant player in productivity apps in the business
world. The office suite has more users than any other software
platform and Google is trying to take some of the users of Office
away though with its cloud offerings including Google
Docs.

Microsoft is set to launch its newest iteration of the
Office productivity suite this year with Office 2010. Microsoft first
talked about Office
2010 last year and the products are expected to ship in the
first half of 2010. Pricing
for the Office suite was unveiled in January 2010 with full
Professional versions costing as much as $499. The high price of the
software is what has many firms looking to cloud-based offerings from
Google that are much cheaper and offer free upgrades.

Google
has updated its Docs software with a number of new features and has
taken one key feature for many users out of the picture. Google
announced on its official
blog that the new Docs service was unveiled this week at its
first-ever Atmosphere cloud computing event. The new changed to
Google Docs includes new document and spreadsheet features.

Changes
to the document software, the Google version of Word, include a new
margin ruler, better numbering and bullets, and better image
placement options. One key update is that the Google Docs software
can now import documents directly from Word and keep the original
formation so users don’t have to fix issues with bullets and
formatting. This is a big feature because many businesses will
continue to use Microsoft Office and will go between it and Google
Docs as employees work.

Google reports that it also made
general speed and responsiveness upgrades to the cloud-based offering
with faster JavaScript processing. Large spreadsheets are now easy to
work with in the browser and feel like they are being edited on the
desktop. Collaboration features were also a big area of focus in the
updates.

The collaboration feature in Docs now supports up to
50 people working on a single document at once and the changes made
by other users can be seen as they happen character-by-character.
InformationWeek reports
that changes made by other users previously took as
long as 15 seconds to show up in the document. That delay
often lead to overlapping changes and confusion in a collaborative
environment.

The big feature that Google has cut from the Docs
offering is offline support. EWeek reports
that starting
on May 3, offline support for Google docs will be
temporarily removed. Exactly how long the temporary removal of
offline support will last is unknown. Offline access was added in
April of 2008.

Google's Anil Sabharwal told eWeek,
"We believe the impact [of removing offline access] will be
minimal. However, we do believe this is a critical part of the story
and we are working diligently to bring it back and provide an
improved offline experience using HTML5 and other modern browser
technologies."

The new speed and features of Google
Docs lean heavily on HTML5 and Google believes it can offer all the
features needed for the productivity suite via HTML5 coding.

"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." -- Michael Dell, after being asked what to do with Apple Computer in 1997